Terror is a blank page

I don’t want to alarm anybody, but do you realize how long it’s been since I started a novel from scratch? It’s been…

hang on…

(counting)

SEVEN YEARS.

(Holy shit. It’s been seven years. I was sort of kidding around when I started this post, but that’s forever!)

I have done a lot of rewriting, screenwriting, editing, marketing, blogging, tumbling, tweeting and facebooking in that time, but aside from a few smaller projects here and there I have basically gone seven years.

Fan Fiction

And that makes the start of the hastily-and-uncreatively-but-only-temporarily-named Immortal 3 a little like writing fan fiction on my own character. Which is weird. Also, and this may be an alarming thing for a published novelist to admit to, but every time I start a new novel I feel like I’m inventing the novel form itself. And I don’t mean, “Look at me, I’m awesomely original”, I mean, “How the FUCK do novels work?”

All I know right now is:

don’t tell the same story I did in the first book

don’t tell the same story I did in the second book

find an organic way to bring back some characters

answer The Question

(No I won’t tell you what The Question is. If you read the books you should know.)

I know only one of those four right now, and I’m already 2200 words in. Personally, I can’t wait to see what happens next.

Because I don’t know either

More honesty: I really don’t know what’s going to happen until Adam tells me. This may sound like an insane way to write books, but it’s gotten me through two so far.

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And here I was, kicking myself for only writing short stories over the last five years. 😉 Wouldn’t it be great if someone else would do all that marketing and promotion so you could focus on writing more books? That and family life eat up 99% of my time and energy right now. Not much left for writing.

hah! Yes. In my meager defense, I did have three unpublished novels to get published– one is still pending publication– and I worked on learning screenwriting. But… yes. Seven years of mostly taking stories I already wrote once and reworking them.